Sean M. Teaford currently lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He recently received
his B.A. in English from Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. At Endicott
he was an editor for the Endicott Review and a poetry reading organizer.
Sean was Endicott College’s nominee for the 2003, 2004 and 2005 Ruth Lilly
Fellowships. He has spent time as a host at various venues including the Boston
National Poetry Month Festival and Barnes and Noble in Peabody, Massachusetts.
He has been a featured reader in the Boston and Philadelphia areas. He won the
2004 Veterans for Peace Poetry Contest and has had over 40 poems published (or
scheduled to be published) in The Endicott Review, The Mad Poets Review,
Poetry Motel, Zillah, The Aurorean, Spare Change, Midstream Magazine, Poetry
Church, and others. He will have two poems from his book of poems, Kaddish Diary,
about Janusz Korczak and the children he nurtured and
protected during the Holocaust, in the revised edition of
Charles Fishman’s
anthology Blood to Remember: American Poetson the Holocaust.

Sean M. Teaford's Introduction to his book
Kaddish Diary:

I originally set out reading Korczak’s “Ghetto Diary” for the sake of learning about the history and
experiences of the Holocaust. As I read further into this book I came to an
astonishing realization that “Ghetto Diary” is not an historic text … it is a
script of life’s dark side.
This is a page in our story that some may gloss over and feel that they have missed nothing but those of us
who have read this page will never forget our life as one; we will always
remember the blood with which those words were scribed and we know that the
people who were murdered are not a footnote. They are the ones who will forever
be our teachers. These poems will never be more than an echo of their
whispers.
This is not just the story of Janusz Korczak and his children but mine as well as yours; these poems are a
“Kaddish Diary.”

Warsaw Epidemic

“I used to write at stops,
in a meadow under a pine tree, sitting on a stump. Everything seemed important
and if I did not note it down I would forget. An irretrievable loss to
humanity.” – Janusz Korczak

The sun peeled the
gray from clouds,
burned their pewter lining.

Mid-day February and
sick students were having
troubled afternoon naps.
Their dry heaves echoed
in the doctor’s ears--he had
nothing to cure a cough,
no antidote for a fever.
The flu flooded the ghetto
like a forgotten fog.

The children lay tightly
curled in their cots--they
lay pale, restlessly immobile.
With every turning groan,
their clothes ruffled like wet paper.

Some orphans cried but
nobody made a sound.
Many prayers are silent.

Below the venting glass
panes, standing on the sleet
encrusted sidewalk, soldiers
laughed while slurping soup--
Korczak’s stomach twisted
as he heard uneaten broth
splash and sizzle in the snow.

The fragrant steam slid
through cracked windows;
he listened as his children
sniffed and moaned. He had
no bowls to scrape with
spoons they did not possess.

Door to Door and Back

“The children are living in constant uncertainty, in fear.” – Janusz Korczak

He slid through the hallway
on the soles of his blistered feet,
ignoring the usual volunteers.
It was the cracks, like veins in
forest green and gray marble,

that reminded the doctor of why
he left every day to collect donations--
like the children the cracks
grew both higher and deeper.

Korczak eased down the
stairs.
The reality of the railing
was that
each time he leaned on it
for support it became
looser--
without reinforcements it
would break.

Slightly winded from his
descent,
the doctor approached the
fragile
Krochmalna Street door and
listened.
Once the muffled clicking
of an officer’s shoes
passed,
he grasped his thinning
coat,
braced himself for the
hypothermic Warsaw winter,
and walked into stinging
snow.

Drifts muted his footsteps,
silence enveloped the
ghetto--
as soundless as a still
clapper.
Not a single ringing coin
echoed in the hush--
each mother had her
own children to sustain.

Cracks in the wall had grown
by the time the doctor
returned.
He had nothing to fill them.

Children’s Games

“Everything else has its limits, only brazen shamelessness is limitless ... I wish I had nothing, so that
they might see it for themselves, and that would be that.” – Janusz Korczak

Playing jacks was all she would do.
Every day.

Occasionally the doctor
would step on a jack. He
always picked them up
and returned them to
the little girl. Every time,
he noticed her hands seemed
colder than the pointed metal.

She gradually lost them all
despite his efforts to find them.
Small rocks from gutters
proved to be adequate substitutes--
they were easier on feet as well.

When she lost the pink rubber ball,
the only thing for her to do was sleep.
The guard knew what he was doing.

With His Children

“The world knows nothing
of many great Poles.”- Janusz Korczak

Some children high stepped,
others
had to be dragged by their
armbands,
but most of them, free
from the crucible orphanage
walls,
blindly obeyed the doctor.

“They don’t want you, just
the children!”

He never replied to the
pleading few.
He only broke step twice
with his troop--
the first was to make sure
the children followed;
the second was to hand a
stack of papers
to a coughing soot-haired
youth--the
one child in the crowd that
day not being
forced to march. Then, the
doctor
resumed his pace as caboose
of the line.

The ghetto sea thinned as
the
hazy box car opened its
doors--
for every child that entered
the train,
ten people lost their
voices.

When the doctor was the only
one left
to walk through the sliding
doors,
the solitary thing that
could be heard
was the ticking of a pocket
watch
lying in the corner of the
cattle car.

Tick! Tick! Tick!

A Pure Breath

“What matters is that all
this did happen.” – Janusz Korczak

The boy pushed away sleep
and,
blinking his silent eyes in
the candlelight,
he listened to Korczak’s
voice.

Echoing above the soldier’s
ash-muffled steps, the only
sound in the camp was
the doctor’s paper cracking
like a stiff flag in a sharp
breeze as he chiseled lead
onto what once was white.

Despite his arthritic
fingers,
he had written hundreds of
pages in the ghetto;
but these were the first
curled letters of his
Kaddish.
This was his last leaf of
script;
the last journal entry which
would never leave his hand.

This was his voice that
would rain
down with his body and
rest in the lungs of
Treblinka.